Endurance Training

So I know I promised a video to wrap up my reposting/rewriting of the Training the Obese Beginner series but, honestly, it was just going to be pointless ranting and I seem to have lost the fire in my belly to do it right now (to be honest I think I just didn’t want to deal with the shooting, editing and transcribing part of it). So here’s some actual new content instead. Today I want to talk about surviving indoor aerobic training.

While we can probably argue until the end of time what the “worst” part of training is, I imagine that most would be willing to put indoor cardio (especially of the steady state/aerobic type) right up there near the top. And while certainly one way to avoid the issue is to either take the no-cardio or intervals only approach, I don’t think either are ideal. The simple reality is that whether it’s for fat loss, general fitness, or for endurance athletes who live somewhere where it’s cold, doing longer duration indoor cardio of some sort is usually a necessary evil.

So today I want to talk about some strategies that can be helpful to help folks get through it or, at the very least, maybe enjoy it more. And I’m not going to bore you with the obvious strategies, listening to music, reading a magazine or book to kill the time or whatever. You know that already. If you’re lucky maybe your gym has a cardio theater where you can watch movies; in my experience all that ends up happening is that you end up watching the same middle of the same crappy movie (when I was in Utah, I must have seen the middle hour of the horrible Queen Latifah/LL Cool J movie “Last Holiday” a solid dozen times).

Instead I’m going to suggest a way of modifying/thinking about your indoor aerobic sessions both to make them less psychologically gruelling (read: “boring as hell”) as well as physiologically more beneficial.

The Inevitable Driving Analogy

For reasons I’ve never quite figured out, when people write about weight training they have a tendency to use car analogies. Probably just because cars are something most people understand. Or because they go “Vroom” or something. Regardless, that’s how it is and I’m going to continue with that tradition here.